1. Field of the Invention
Various embodiments described herein relate generally to electronic form filling, and more particularly to locating, identifying, mapping and completing form fields in electronic forms for use in electronic form filling applications.
2. Related Art
The vision of a paperless modern society is quickly becoming a reality, as more and more communications, services and transactions take place digitally across networks such as the Internet. The need for paper copies of correspondence, financial documents, receipts, contracts and other legal instruments is dwindling as electronic methods for securely transmitting, updating and accessing these documents increases. In addition to the electronic transmission and access to documents and correspondence, the process of electronically submitting information is also commonplace, such as with online shopping or applications for loans, credit cards, health insurance, college or job applications, etc.
However, much of the information required in these forms is common to other forms, and yet users manually repeat populating the form inputs with the same information over and over again. Although conventional form filler applications (e.g., Google Chrome®) have been able to alleviate some of this tedium and repetitiveness, more and more websites are implementing changes to the design of their webpages that thwart the proper operation of these conventional form filler applications.
There are two main reasons why conventional form filler applications are failing. First, a form filler application must be able to successfully locate substantially all the fields in a form. Second, after successfully locating the form fields, a form filler application must then be able to accurately identify each form field so that the correct information can be entered. But conventional form filler applications struggle with form field identification because they depend on a static set of form field attributes to determine the appropriate information for each field. On the one hand, form fields can be ascribed attribute values that are ambiguous (e.g., an identical or similar form field name for multiple form fields), meaningless (e.g., form field IDs that are random alphanumeric values), or even misleading. Consequently, conventional form filler applications cannot correctly identify form fields on a consistent basis.
Thus, despite the availability of conventional form filler applications, the ability to effectively collect, organize, update, utilize, and reapply the input information required to complete electronic documents, such as web forms, PDFs and applications, remains elusive.